Tag: agile coach

Product Owner coaching challenges for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches

As part of our upcoming “Coach Your Product Owner” course, we’ve been hard at work creating simple and actionable tools you can use to help your Product Owner progress. But that coaching cannot happen unless we tackle the biggest problems we have when coaching Product Owners. So, last week I asked people who receive my Newsletter to help me answer this question:

When it comes to Coaching and Supporting your Product Owner(s), what is the single Biggest Challenge that you are facing right now?

The reason for this question is my belief that, as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, we must help the Product Owners as part of our duties. Sometimes those duties may be just about helping them manage/facilitate a particular session, but often we need to help the Product Owner grow their skills, knowledge, and experience with Agile product development. All aspects of it.

So what are the key challenges we face, when coaching and supporting our Product Owners?

Read on to find out…

Continue reading Product Owner coaching challenges for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches

Product Owner Anti-Patterns, and how Scrum Masters can help overcome those

Product Owners have an impossible job! I know, I’ve been a Product Owner. And even worse, a Product Manager transitioning to Product Owner! And even worse! I was also the Project Manager. Geeez! When I look back I am amazed I survived that phase of my career.

Here’s the kicker, that was the best time of my Agile adoption journey. I got to see my ideas come to life so quickly! And have a concrete business impact (the product we delivered went on to generate 10 Million Eur in sales a little over 3 years).

My Product Owner journey towards Agile was not easy! Let me tell you how I survived that stressful time, and lived on to learn a lot from the experience.

Continue reading Product Owner Anti-Patterns, and how Scrum Masters can help overcome those

Angel Medinilla from Project Manager to Agile Coach

We all transition from different roles. Some of us start as developers or testers or other roles and end up working with teams as Scrum Masters. Angel shares his journey from Project Manager to Scrum Master.
We also mention how to tackle the presence of laggards, people who are not ready to adopt agile because of their fears and anxieties about the change.

About Angel Medinilla

Ángel Medinilla (Spain, 1973) has 18+ years working experience in the ICT market. In 2007 he started his own Agile Consulting firm. Today, Proyectalis is considered the leading Agile consulting and coaching company in Spain, and one of the most well-known in Europe and Latin America,
He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences all over the world
He is the author of Agile Management (Springer) and “Agile Kaizen: Continuous Improvement Far Beyond Retrospectives’ (Springer). He also contributed to Beyond Agile: Stories of Agile Transformations, (Modus Cooperandi).
In 2015 he co-founded Improvement21, whose goal is to bring the continuous improvement habit to all kind of organizations in order to create better cultures, teams, processes and products.
You can connect with Angel Medinilla on LinkedIn, and contact Angel Medinilla on Twitter.

Zach Bonaker on Apprenticeship for Scrum Masters

Zach shares his journey as a Scrum Master and how important it is to get a pair in your own journey. Apprenticeship for Scrum Masters is not a new idea, but it is an important part in our toolbox for learning as Scrum Masters.

About Zach Bonaker

Zach Bonaker is Benevolent Trouble-Maker from San Diego. He’s an agile coach who specializes in bringing lean thinking to organizations and teams over varying sizes across the country. Zach builds relationships to help transform people, systems, and structures towards safer and faster ways of delivering high quality software. When he isn’t thinking about next-generation agile ideas, Zach can be found enjoying the sunny west coast weather and connecting with people all around the world. Follow Zach Bonaker on Twitter, and connect with Zach Bonaker on Linkedin.

Dennis Mansell talks about two important parts of the system – System Health and System Productivity

In this episode Dennis explains the difference between two tools that he uses at the organizations he works with. He explains how he uses these tools to measure System Health and System Productivity.

About Dennis Mansell

Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.

Dennis Mansell explains how happiness index can be a useful measure to define Scrum Master success

Dennis tells us how he uses a technique known by Henrik Kniberg – happiness index in his daily work. He also explains how important it is to understand what people inside of the team say; he believes that part of a Scrum Master role is to create a good environment within the team. If there are many things being said in a negative way the Scrum Master has a lot of things to do in order to improve the team performance.

About Dennis Mansell

Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.

Dennis Mansell talks how it is important for a Scrum Master to create an environment where change happens even without the presence of the Scrum Master

Dennis tells us a very interesting story from his sailing activities. He explains to our audience how it is important to build an environment of collaboration and most importantly an environment where “things” happen even if the most important persons in the team are not present.

About Dennis Mansell

Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.

Dennis Mansell talks how a semi destructive team is even worse than a complete destructive team

Dennis discusses that most of the times when we start to work as a team, we simply put people together expecting that everything will work. We even forget to ask if people do actually want to work together. In this episode he explains how that can go wrong.

About Dennis Mansell

Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.

Dmytro Orlyk talks how the systems that put pressure on software developers will not enable high quality deliveries.

In this episode Dmytro describes how the system impacts the teams and the software deliveries. He explains that in order for the teams to deliver a great quality they must be part of a system, which allows them to experiment and develop features without the daily pressure.

About Dmytro Orlyk

Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.

Dmytro Orlyk talks how being part of a team that is improving can be used as tool to measure Scrum Master success

Dmytro explains that being part of a successful team is part of a Scrum Master success. After all, it is his job to create successful teams. Dmytro also gives us some good tips: in order for Scrum Masters to continue improving, they should develop themselves in areas where they feel they are not so strong. They could take some time to analyze their weakness and take some training to tackle those areas.

About Dmytro Orlyk

Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.